Glitch Update

(I’m talking about the online game, not the malfunction in our water heater. That glitch has not changed since yesterday evening when I discovered it.)

I logged in to Glitch yesterday on a whim; I stopped paying attention to it about a year ago, when I had reached a point where I was mostly grinding (in the online game sense of ‘performing repetitive tasks for necessary rewards’), and although I understand some reasons for incorporating grinds in online games, that sort of activity was the antihesis of the reason I had been playing Glitch in the beginning (and the hyperantithesis of why I was a regular player of Glitch’s prehistoric grandparent, the Game Neverending).

So I logged in and was quite disoriented by what I saw. Even more eerie, though, was that within seconds of my login, Stoot Barfield (the nom de jeu of game designer Stewart Butterfield) popped up beside me and began gently clueing me in to the very very many changes that had been incorporated into the game since last I had visited. Honestly, I can’t recall even the changes I saw in the two hours or so I was logged in. I can say, though, that everything about the newer version struck me as a significant improvement, tending more to encourage whimsy, sharing, and good humour than grinding, cutthroat competition, trollery, and gaming the system.

I know many of my friends have dormant accounts with the Glitch beta — if you bothered to look in in the first place, you should probably check back after these revolutionary changes. It’s still in beta (or to be more precise, it’s back in beta after having crept out toward formal completion for a brief interval before the developers decided that they wanted to shuffle the deck once more before opening the doors. That was an intensely wise decision; if the rest of the game has matured as impressively as the dimensions I saw yesterday, Glitch has tons of potential. And if you didn’t get in on the beta earlier, ask around among the players you know. Players have a limited number of invitations they can share with their friends.

One Response to Glitch Update

Some unknown force compelled me to look at Glitch again about ten days ago. It does seem to have undergone some improvements, but playing it on and off for a week or so took things back to being grindy. Managing energy, in particular seemed to be a pain. You have to create food to really keep up enough energy to keep playing for a while, but gathering ingredients for food leaves little time for general exploring or other aspects of the game.